True, while I was away for five days, first to NECSS and then to the AACR Meeting, mail piled up, and I had to go through it last night. Also, just for the heck of it, my wife and I went out to dinner at a local diner. Finally, to complete the unwinding process, last night I sat on my posterior and watched a couple of shows that I had missed during my absence, while lazily searching the web for material to get me back into the blogging thing. Yes, I know I spent a fair amount of verbiage yesterday taking down a mountain of burning stupid by everybody’s favorite science-, reason-, and logic-challenged homeopath Dana Ullman, but one post alone isn’t enough to get me back into the groove after an absence of several days. I need more. Fortunately, there’s one other woo-meister who has been a frequent target–I mean topic–of this blog. Yes, I’m referring to the one man who comes closest to capturing the crazy vibe of the One True Site of All Woo on the Internet, Whale.to. I’m referring, not surprisingly, to that promoter of all medical woo, that man who never saw a form of quackery he didn’t like or a pharmaceutical drug he did like, Mike Adams of NaturalNews.com, who has produced yet another screed so brain dead, so full of logical fallacies, so chock full of straw men that I wonder if he does it intentionally in order to provide fodder for skeptic blogs.

Naaahh. Adams just isn’t smart enough or knowledgeable enough. It’s all him, and he’s sincere. His brain also apparently consists of two neurons connected by a spirochete, and he just got a massive dose of penicillin. (Think about it a minute; you’ll understand what I mean.) Just look at his latest attack on scientific medicine if you don’t believe me. It’s entitled The 10 biggest health care lies in America, and it’s one of the biggest unintentional gigglefests I’ve seen in a long, long time. He starts with an introduction to set the scene:

Mainstream health care isn’t based on “health” or “caring.” It’s actually based on an ingrained system of medical mythology that’s practiced — and defended — by those who profit from the continuation of sickness and disease. This system of medical mythology might also simply be called “lies”, and today I’m sharing with NaturalNews readers the top ten lies that are still followed and promoted under mainstream health care in America today.

Whenever you hear Mike Adams accuse anyone of lies, you know it’s a massive case of projection. This case is no different. What Adams accuses science-based medicine of are lies, but the only lies here are his. In fact, his world view is based on nothing more than mythology, the mythology that “natural” means better, that magical thinking can cure disease, and that vaccines are evil incarnate. So let’s march through Mike Adams’ ten lies, realizing that the lies there are not the lies of scientific medicine but those of Mike Adams:

Lie #1) Vaccines make you healthy

This is a massive straw man argument. No one says that vaccines make you healthy. They are, however, very effective at preventing infectious disease. While it’s true that remaining free of infectious disease is a very good thing indeed, it is not enough in and of itself to be free of infectious disease to be healthy, yet that is the position that Adams tries to pin on advocates of science-based medicine. He even claims that vitamin D is more effective than the H1N1 vaccine at preventing the flu. Not surprisingly, he does so with no evidence. The article that he cites as evidence of his claim in turn also contains no evidence to support his claim. Such is Adam’s methodology.

Next up:

Lie #2) Pharmaceuticals prevent disease

The big push by Big Pharma is now focused on treating healthy people with drugs as if pharmaceuticals were nutrients that could somehow prevent disease. This is the new push with cholesterol drugs: Give ’em to everyone, whether they have high cholesterol or not!

But pharmaceuticals don’t prevent disease, and medications are not vitamins. Your body has no biological need for any pharmaceuticals at all. People who believe they need pharmaceuticals have simply been the victims of “fabricated consent” engineered by Big Pharma’s clever advertising and P.R. spin.

This is, of course, simply false. Vaccines prevent disease. Cholesterol-reducing drugs decrease the risk of heart disease and heart attacks. Controlling blood pressure with antihypertensive drugs decreases the risk of stroke and heart attack In women at high risk for breast cancer, Tamoxifen can reduce that risk by 50%. While it can be argued that pharmaceutical companies are overly eager to sell “preventative” drugs for an ever-expanding list of indications, many of these drugs actually do work. The questions around them tend to revolve mainly around cost and whether there are side effects that make the benefits not worth the cost.

As for the bit about the body not requiring pharmaceuticals, that is yet another massive straw man. No one says that the body does require these drugs. They are not food, and no one claims that they are food. Indeed, comparing them to food is disingenuous. Even so, many of these drugs have helped prolong life and prevent complications of disease.

Here’s one of the funniest ones:

Lie #3) Doctors are experts in health

Doctors don’t even study health; they study disease. Modern doctors are taught virtually nothing about nutrition, wellness or disease prevention. Expecting a doctor to guide you on health issues is sort of like expecting your accountant to pilot a jet airliner — it’s simply not something he or she has ever been trained in.

That’s not to say doctors aren’t intelligent people. Most of them have high Iqs. But even a genius can’t teach you something they know nothing about.

If a genius can’t teach you something they know nothing about, what can a moron like Mike Adams teach you about what he knows nothing about? Is his stupid a multiplier of ignorance? Inquiring minds want to know!

In any case, it’s bullshit, plain and simple, that doctors are not taught about nutrition or disease prevention. We are. The difference is that physicians are taught about nutrition and disease prevention based on science and evidence, not based on fairy dust, fantasy, and nonsense, which are the basis underlying Adams’s world view, which brings us to:

Lie #4) You have no role in your own healing

That is a lie, but not in the way that Adams thinks. It’s a lie to claim that modern medicine says you have no role in your health. In fact, it’s such a ridiculous, transparent lie that I call it a lie. As idiotic as Adams is, even I don’t think he’s idiotic enough to actually believe this one. This one too:

Lie #5) Disease is a matter of bad luck or bad genes

Western medicine wants you to believe in the mythology of spontaneous disease — disease that strikes without cause. This is equivalent to saying that disease is some sort of voodoo black magic and that patients have no way to prevent disease through their own diets or lifestyle choices.

It’s funny, actually: Western medicine claims to be driven by scientific, rational thinking, and yet the entire industry still fails to acknowledge that chronic disease always has a cause and that most of the time, that cause has everything to do with nutritional deficiencies, exposure to toxic chemicals and a lack of exercise.

Disease is almost never a matter of bad luck or bad genes.

Actually, disease is quite often a matter of bad luck and/or bad genes. It can be bad luck to be exposed to pathogenic bacteria or viruses. It can be bad luck that one of your cells acuqired just the right set of mutations to result in cancer. It could be bad genes, such as having cancer-causing mutations in BRCA1, some mutations of which result in an 80% or greater chance of developing breast cancer within a woman’s lifetime. In fact, having such a bad gene is purely bad luck because you can’t control who your parents are. Take a disease like Huntington’s chorea, the gene for which is an autosomal dominant. If one of your parents has it, you have a 50% chance of developing the disease. It’s nothing but bad luck to be born to a parent with the gene.

In reality, Adams is giving voice to one of the most persistent myths of the “alt-med” movement, namely that you can always prevent disease, that disease is never due to bad luck, that it is always due to your choices. It is the myth of total control. If you eat the right diet, take the right supplements, consume the right vitamins, do the right exercises, in the eyes of Adams and people like him you become virtually immune to any disease. You become magically immune to cancer. Even infectious disease can’t affect you. Because you’re among the righteous, and disease is a punishment for not living an upright and “healthy” life. Adams’ view has far more in common with religion than it does with science, and his view of disease echoes, more closely than anything else, the view of ancient races or medieval priests that disease is a punishment from the gods or from God, except in this case it’s nature’s punishment.

Next up:

Lie #6) Screening equals prevention

Western medicine doesn’t believe in disease prevention. Rather, the industry believes in screening while calling it prevention. But screening isn’t prevention by even the wildest stretch of the imagination. In fact, virtually all the popular screening methodologies actually promote diseases.

This is one where there’s a grain of truth to it that Adams has stretched beyond all reality. Screening is viewed as a form of prevention, the idea being to detect disease at an earlier stage, when it is either easier to treat or when intervention may prevent the sequelae of a condition. It is also true that screening is a complicated issue with tradeoffs and the necessity to evaluate risks versus benefits. Some screening tests detect disease that would never develop to the point of threatening the patient’s life, which is known as overdiagnosis. The issue came to the fore when the USPSTF issued new guidelines for mammographic screening for cancer. Practitioners of science-based medicine are aware of the complexities and tradeoffs of screening an asymptomatic population for disease, any disease. It is Mike Adams who seems to view screenign as an all-or-nothing affair, and to him it’s all bad.

On to the next one:

Lie #7) Health insurance will keep you healthy

Again, this is a massive straw man. No one says this. Having insurance doesn’t keep you healthy. However, it does allow you to access the health care system when you become ill, and it does allow you to access preventative care that you might not be able to afford for yourself, such as colonoscopies after age 50. Also, don’t forget that there is a fair amount of evidence that people without health insurance suffer poorer outcomes due to a variety of diseases because they delay seeking care. By the time they do, their conditions are more advanced and more difficult to treat.

Lie #8) Hospitals are places of health and healing

Again, this is mostly a straw man. Hospitals are places for the treatment of acute diseases. These days, we try very hard to keep patients out of hospitals and to minimize their time in the hospital. I will admit, though, that I’m amazed that Adams was willing to admit that hospitals are actually quite good at saving lives after trauma.

Lie #9 cracked me up:

Lie #9) Conventional medicine is “advanced” state-of-the-art medicine

Even though doctors and health authorities try to pass off western medicine as being “advanced” or “modern,” the whole system is actually pathetically outdated and stuck in the germ theory of disease. Western medicine has yet to even acknowledge the role of nutrition in preventing disease — something that has been scientifically documented for at least the last several decades. Western medicine fails to acknowledge mind-body medicine and hilariously believes the mind plays virtually no role in healing.

Neither does western medicine acknowledge the bio energy field of living systems, nor that organ transplants carry memories, nor that living food is qualitatively different from dead food. Seriously: Conventional doctors still believe that dead food is exactly the same as living food! (And the USDA food pyramid still makes no distinction between the two…)

Adams accuses modern medicine of being “stuck in the germ theory of disease” as though that were a bad thing! It’s also utter nonsense that “Western” medicine doesn’t acknowledge the role of nutrition in preventing disease. Is Adams on crack? What Adams doesn’t like is that there is no evidence to support the magical, mystical properties attributed to food by Adams and his ilk.

Perhaps the reason that “Western” medicine doesn’t acknowledge that living food is qualitatively different from “dead” food is because there is no evidence it is, at least not in the way that Adams thinks, with “living energy” in “living” plants that somehow makes them healthier to eat. Perhaps the reason “Western” medicine doesn’t acknowledge that organ transplants carry memories is because there is no evidence that they do. Perhaps the reason that “Western” medicine doesn’t acknowledge the existence of qi is because there is no good evidence that it exists or that magically manipulating it the way that reiki practitioners or acupuncturists say can heal disease.

But what do I know? After all, I don’t want to know the truth, and I don’t want cures. Just ask Mike Adams:

Lie #10) More research is needed to find “cures”

This lie is especially hilarious because western medicine does not believe in any “cure” for any disease. They aren’t even looking for cures! This lie has been repeated since the 1960’s, when cancer scientists claimed they were only a few years away from curing cancer. Today, four decades later, can you think of a single major disease that western medicine has cured? There aren’t any.

Uh, I can think of major diseases that Western medicine has cured. There are a whole bunch of infectious diseases, for instance, that antibiotics can cure. There are several varieties of cancer that are curable with a high degree of probability. In my own field of surgery, I can point out several diseases that are completely curable with surgery, including appendicitis, cholecystitis, bowel obstructions, hernias, and broken bones. Adams is just plain wrong. Whatever “Western” medicine’s faults–and there are many–it is not so useless and pathetic that it can’t cure a single disease. it may not do so well with chronic diseases at times, but it sure as hell can cure a lot of acute diseases, and it can manage quite a few chronic diseases quite well. Adams claims that the “cures” exist in the form of naturopathic medicines, herbal remedies, and nutrition, but he attributes far more power to these modalities than evidence supports. Besides, there’s no such thing as “Western” medicine or “alternative” medicine. There’s medicine that has been proven scientifically to work, medicine that hasn’t, and medicine that has been proven not to work. When an “alternative” medical treatment is proven to work, it become simply medicine.

Not that that stops Adams from spraying burning stupid hither and yon over his readers like napalm, or perhaps the way Marines used to aim their flamethrowers into Japanese pillboxes on Guadalcanal back in 1943 in order to incinerate the defenders. Only in this case, it’s Adams sticking the nozzle of his flamethrower of burning stupid into your ear and incinerating your brain. It’s about the only thing he’s good at besides lying.

As for the bit about the body not requiring pharmaceuticals, that is yet another massive straw man. No one says that the body does require these drugs.

I’ll go a step further on this one and say that in some cases the body does require some drugs to be healthy. I’m specifically referring to medications such as synthetic thyroid hormone. Granted, a healthy person doesn’t need them, but for those of us who are unable to produce them, they are essential for good health.

Of course, according to this wing nut I’ve done something wrong to cause my thyroid problems. I guess its all that dead food I eat or something. If only I had eaten live food my thyroid would still be functioning today. Maybe it’s not too late. Pardon me while I head out to a farm so I can gnaw on Bessie as she wanders around the pasture.

Ok…call me dumb…but what is the difference between living and dead food. I get it with animals, but if you pluck a bean off the vine, do you not kill the bean too?
Thanks for any clarification. Need to go eat my bacon now.

All of this is false, and much of it dangerous—but what infuriates me is the blame-the-victim mentality.

In Adams’s world-view, it is somehow my friend’s fault that she has been unable to walk without pain for over thirty years. Not the fault of the bastard who got drunk, got behind the wheel of a car, and injured my then-11-year-old friend and killed her sister.

In that world-view, the people left with chronic lung disease from breathing the fumes produced by the destruction of the World Trade Center somehow did something wrong, and can overcome it by exercise or the right diet. Not the fault of the people who flew the planes into the towers. (Or maybe he’d be willing to blame this one on the government, since the EPA lied and told us all it was safe.)

Orac is right to regularly tear Mikey a new one. Adams deserves it but as with most of these charlatans, follow the money. Adams is selling competitive (to sbm) products and whether or not their efficacy is proven or even tested is of no concern. In fact, expensive testing would cut into his bottom line. Adams has found a significantly large population of credulous fools willing to part with a few bucks to enjoy his aura of false good health.

Adams never fails to make me laugh,however,there is something about him that’s not funny at all: he has a large audience.Like Null,he probably grossly inflates the figures(and doesn’t discount those who check in solely for snark fodder)as being in the “millions”.Unfortunately,they influence decision making in vulnerable people:I have heard people with serious illness consulting Null over the radio and at a live “lecture” who were discouraged about conventional treatments in favor of woo-centric modalities.That’s not a joke.

The difference between living and “dead” food is subtle and mostly in the minds of people like Mike Adams who cling to the vitalistic concept of organics.

Most fresh vegetables are quite capable of germinating and growing a new plant. Beans, peas, corn, nuts, etc. are just the seeds of their plant species. They are how it reproduces. Plant them and they will sprout.

Root vegetables like potatoes and carrots will also start growing. They don’t even need to be planted. Just leave a bag of potatoes on your kitchen counter for a few weeks and they will start putting out roots.

But freezing or cooking them interferes with this by damaging the underlying structure with ice crystals or breaking down the chemicals with heat.

But, once the food gets into the chemical factory of your stomach and intestines, this difference is moot unless there are a few free-riders piggy-backing along. If Mike Adams really eats only fresh, “live” food, I wonder if he ever gets a staph or e coli infection?

If you eat the right diet, take the right supplements, consume the right vitamins, do the right exercises, in the eyes of Adams and people like him you become virtually immune to any disease.

Not only that; you should in theory become immortal if you simply do all the right things. But as well all know, Hulda Clark died of cancer, and Adams will one day be dead as well. Chances are he will die because of a disease.

Better question: how does it go to the theatre with its wife? Does it dress in a tuxedo? Maybe with a monocle on its webcam?

My favourite part of the “live food” lie is that he starts the point by saying that “western” medicine is stuck in an out-dated paradigm. You might be able to stretch the timeline for germ theory back to van Leeuwenhoek (but it’s closer to Koch, about 100 years back). Vitalism (the idea that living substances are ensouled and are different from dead substances) goes back to at least Aristotle’s day. Which is to say nothing of the fact that it has been shown to be untrue.

Also, I thought it was cheeky of him to say that they are “qualitatively” different substances. Filtered tap water is qualitatively different from filtered bottled water, but they have identical properties.

This is an excellent post, and destroys whatever credibility he may have. Sadly, he has his legions of suckers.

Mike Adams is a coward, both intellectually and pysically. He ran away to South America and never engages in discussion or debate with anyone. He claims to be a former US Army Ranger, but, he was most likely a R.E.M.F. and never saw combat for a second.

Western medicine has yet to even acknowledge the role of nutrition in preventing disease — something that has been scientifically documented for at least the last several decades.

Yeah, scientifically documented by scientists, some of whom are physicians. Nice self-contradiction. Who does he think is scientifically documenting the role of nutrition in preventing disease if not people involved in medicine; Eastern mystics?

One of the strangest non-existent things I think woomeisters promote is the conscious mind’s ability to control the body at the cellular level. (as in Andrew Weil’s “happy people don’t get sick” meme) Hell, if I could tell my cells what to do, I’d tell them all to give me a 21-year-old body again. AND keep it that way! 🙂

It is, of course, absurd, and just another way to promote a course which is nearly impossible to comply with and therefore very difficult to see fail. It’s not the diet that failed — it’s *you*. This sort of thinking is very common, because it’s so appealing to feel you have the answer, and so hard to admit, even to yourself, when you actually don’t.

We can also talk about insulin or any other hormone therapy. Not to mention antibiotics or other naturally-occurring substances (botox?) which are definitely used both by animals/plants/fungi/bacteria/LGM* and human medicine for their particular biological functions.
To put it another way: so a stupid mold can use a weird molecule to kill bacteria, but we should not use it because it’s not produced by our own body? What’s the point of being a tool-using species, then?

The distinction between a drug and a natural molecule is disingenuous. By definition, a drug is a biologically active molecule (in a medical context). There is going to be a huge overlap between the two categories.

Not that I am advocating for polypharmacy, mind you. I don’t think reaching for a pill every times you feel sick is a good reflex. Consulting a real physician, on the other hand, is.
Notice also that this pill-reaching reflex is exactly that this naturopathy crowd is doing, despite all their drug-decrying posture. They want a pill to live forever. Calling these molecules “natural” or “food supplement” doesn’t change the fact that this is pill-taking behaviour.

@ 8 Vicki

Sadly, I’m afraid Mr Adams has another answer for this particular case. He professed in the past some 9/11 truther beliefs. It was part of a rant a few months ago about what skeptics believe, in his opinion (also chokefull of fallacies).
So, see, it’s never the fault of Good Loving Mother Nature, it’s always this fascist US gov’.
(note for any passerby – last sentence was “Sarcasm Inside tm”)

Not that that stops Adams from spraying burning stupid hither and yon over his readers like napalm, or perhaps the way Marines used to aim their flamethrowers into Japanese pillboxes on Guadalcanal back in 1943 in order to incinerate the defenders. Only in this case, it’s Adams sticking the nozzle of his flamethrower of burning stupid into your ear and incinerating your brain. It’s about the only thing he’s good at besides lying.

#9 – This isn’t the most helpful, but Mary Roach’s book Stiff mentions some extremely shoddy research regarding the memory of transplanted organs, and IIRC some better research done that demonstrated it was all bogus. The research “proving” that organs have a memory was all anecdotal and based on stereotypes. I think one of the anecdotes was a woman who received an organ from a prostitute and became really promiscuous, for example.

If a genius can’t teach you something they know nothing about, what can a moron like Mike Adams teach you about what he knows nothing about? Is his stupid a multiplier of ignorance? Inquiring minds want to know!

I can enlighten you. Mike Adams has homeopathic intelligence. Many years ago, he had an intelligent thought, then he banged his head on a wall until it was all gone.

Well thank you, Amazon’s “search inside the book” feature – I found the portion of Stiff that discusses organ memory. Apparently it’s a belief with heart transplants specifically. The evidence she cites is a 1991 interview – of 47 heart transplant patients interviewed by a team of Viennese surgeons, 3 claimed to have had changes in personality following transplant and ascribed those changes to their donated heart.

The other person she cites is a guy named Paul Pearsall, who sounds like a self-help-through-alt-med type. He is the one with all of the silly stereotypes – woman gets heart of gay man and becomes super-feminine, woman gets heart of prostitute and become super-promiscuous, man gets heart of teenager and now loves rock and roll music. Needless to say, these are all anonymous anecdotes presented in one of his books.

Oddly enough, the debunking information is partially presented by someone we’ve seen here before – Dr. Oz. I think this must be before he was famous, since she only introduces him as “Mehmet Oz, the transplant surgeon I spoke with”.

Western medicine…isn’t that kind of insulting? Claiming that science & evidence based medicine is somehow the property of American/European cultures. Science belongs to all people, not just ‘the west’. Furthermore, disease being bad luck, I can just imagine seeing Adams try to tell some young healthy athletic person with cancer that their illness is their own fault. I wonder how long it would be before one of them handed Adams his butt neatly wrapped with all the trimmings?

“Adams’ view has far more in common with religion than it does with science, and his view of disease echoes, more closely than anything else, the view of ancient races or medieval priests that disease is a punishment from the gods or from God…”
Actually, the “mainstream” of religious traditions don’t have much trouble with the idea of “bad things happen to good people” (see Book of Job). Views to the contrary, as in “health and wealth”/ “name it and claim it” in modern American Christianity, are more of a populist or “fringe” phenomenon.

if you indeed eat live animals (cue mental image of one very scared/angry pig) … you might get scratches or bites that would be possible sites for infection, so in that case, you might NOT really be considered healthier.

Can anyone tell me where I can find one of these “Western” doctors? My doctor is always on me about getting more exercise and eating vegetables. I would prefer one that lets me eat chili dogs and watch TV in peace.

Reminds me of the time I came across the recipe for live goose (put goose inside a ring of fire with lots of apple sauce- heat stressed goose will eat apple sauce, defecate a lot, and collapse and slowly be cooked).

If Mike gets a Salmonella sp. infection from eating live food like raw veggies grown in compost or raw chicken, someone should definitely make a documentary about it. “Meet the man who said live food was better than dead food. Notice the gangrene setting in.”

Ok…call me dumb…but what is the difference between living and dead food. I get it with animals, but if you pluck a bean off the vine, do you not kill the bean too?

According to the raw-foodists, the enzymes in plants (which are destroyed by cooking) are good for you. The claims of why they’re good for you ranges from the least absurd of aiding digestion, to the more absurd of the human body producing no enzymes of its own and needing an external source, to the most absurd of “enzymes” being a synonym for “vital force”.

I don’t know if Adams is a raw-foodist, but his bit about “living foods” sounds pretty close to it.

Ahh…the name of Carolyn Dean has cropped up…I had a tussle with this mental midget back in the 90s when she surfaced on the Dini Petty talk show to do some label reading. Her astute advice to the public was “if you can’t pronounce it, don’t eat it.” I engaged her in some energetic correspondence, pointing out that the number of syllables in a chemical’s name has nothingto do with determining its safety and she shot back with some incomprehensibel drivel about the wonders of homeopathy. For a couple of years we went back and forth with our attempts to educate each other. I tried to edify her in chemistry (a class she had obviously skipped throughout her “education”)and she regaled me with the miracles of homeopathy. She was excellent fodder for my radio show. Could always count on her for some imbecilic comment. Not quite the burning stupid of Mike Adams…let’s face it..Adams cannot be matched. He is the village idiot in a village of village idiots. Then in the late 90s, one of my letters came back..”address unknown.” (Yes..we corresponded by snail mail..she never did get into email…too bad because she could have followed in Benveniste’s footsteps with “homeopathic email”) Turned out she had migrated to greener pastures in the US where her brand of malarkey was more marketable. I would love to take credit for driving her out of Canada but I think it was the attraction of milking the great American public that actually did it. Adams and Carolyn Dean make a good combo of synergistic stupidity.

It’s hilarious that these enzyme know-it-alls presume a superior knowledge of nutrition, yet don’t know that enzymes are proteins which are denatured by gastric acid and are broken down by pancreatic proteases in the duodenum before being absorbed.

Oh yes, that’s a common belief, it’s all over the internet. Apparently it’s the premise of Cecilia Ahern’s romance novel Thanks for the Memories, too: woman gets blood transfusion from a man, gains his memories and personality, the magic link draws them together… Sounds a lot more creepy than romantic, to me.

What matters is that you get some raw with every meal, that’s what matters. In fact, I eat a lot of quinoa. I boil some quinoa, put in some onions, make a nice warm soup, put some ginger in there… But I would never cook fruit or nuts or seeds. Those things always need to be eaten raw in my opinion.

If blood transfusions transfer memories you would think fewer companies that handle proprietary information would hold blood drives. I can just imagine the board meeting at Microsoft. “We understand there was a blood drive at Apple,” the manager says pulling out a knife. “So, who’s gonna take one for the team?”

It’s hilarious that these enzyme know-it-alls presume a superior knowledge of nutrition, yet don’t know that enzymes are proteins which are denatured by gastric acid

I’ve seen one “plant enzymes help digestion” raw-foodist claim that some denatured plant enzymes will spontaneously re-fold into their original shape once the stomach acids are neutralized in the intestines.

I was under the impression that proteases such as trypsin will digest proteins whether they are denatured or not. At least I thought this is what my mass spec friends had indicated. So even if the enzymes could refold after passing through the stomach wouldn’t they likely just get digested like everything else?

@53 Hmm, I see that Steve Jobs got his liver from a Tennesee transplant program. I wonder what sort of questions the donor screen for that one involved? “Blood type?” “Favorite color of mock turtleneck?”

And perhaps someone can check whether he’s been loading more country music on his iPod since the transplant?…

Not that that stops Adams from spraying burning stupid hither and yon over his readers like napalm, or perhaps the way Marines used to aim their flamethrowers into Japanese pillboxes on Guadalcanal back in 1943 in order to incinerate the defenders. Only in this case, it’s Adams sticking the nozzle of his flamethrower of burning stupid into your ear and incinerating your brain. It’s about the only thing he’s good at besides lying.

And I reply with: Orac is like the sniper popping the flammenwerfer truppen in the pressure tank, which is how one deals with flamethrower troops.

I flipped the “side” of the flamethrower guy from the USMC to the Wehrmacht, because I like the idea of Orac being on the side of the goodguys, but historically it’s still good — Germany was the only other power to use flamethrowers in any large numbers.

If somebody eats primarily junk food or smokes or drinks excessively or is a couch potato or is a silly combination of all of those how are they not responsible for the hypertension or heart disease that develops later in life? Pointing out the role you play in many preventable diseases isn’t blaming the victim, unless your a Tea Party conservative pundit who doesn’t want to pay for others bad habits. Educating the public isn’t good enough, now we have those damn elitists and experts saying ban salt, ban trans fats , ban public smoking.
Tongue in cheek I say.

Since many degenerative diseases take a while, 30-60 years to set in, what you put in your mouth matters, eventually. For example the desire for women to consume more calcium at a younger age and over a lifetime, is such that when they hit menopause they have more bone mass in reserve. this adds up over time. So nutrition does play a role in many diseases, and you can control what you put in your mouth.

In my experience, if you ask people to eat foods like greens, and legumes and nuts etc and pass on the soda or limit other known risk factors, many people get all cry babyish about it. It doesn’t taste good, the pills are too big to swallow, the side effects are to much to handle. So many objections, but they sincerely want the results without the work. Which while asinine, makes sense given our culture.

Just one last comment. Large randomized placebo controlled studies on nutritional supplements have one problem. Companies can’t patent them the way you can a drug. So it is impossible to recoup the costs of the a study. I’ve heard people say that is a problem, and a good thing. It’s a problem since it is actually closing the door to some potentially useful remedies, and a good thing in that it allows the free market enterprise system to flourish. I could care less about the latter, I want to assist people in getting healthy and staying healthy, with a minimal amount of side effects and discomfort on their part. But I also want god sound science to support that. And I am not talking about wooish magiky crap. BTW this problem is in a way effecting the pharmaceutical development industry. Roadblocks put in place by the FDA and their revolving door of FDA-pharma. In essence limiting competition. At least pharmaceutical companies have to do massive amounts of research before they can declare something about their products. I sit on the fence, selling products to stores, products I feel okay about since they aren’t claiming to be cure alls. And over in wooland, it’s a scary sight to be in the trenches with those idiots daily.

In my experience, if you ask people to eat foods like greens, and legumes and nuts etc and pass on the soda or limit other known risk factors, many people get all cry babyish about it.

Judgmental much? How do you know what we eat? You obviously don’t know many people.

Here is the other corollary: One person I knew that was very big on the alternative health stuff was the picky eater. She was using the natural food supplements as a substitute for greens, vegies and legumes.

Clayton, sometimes you can’t fight your genes. I have a very good non-smoking friend who exercises regularly, eats healthy, and maintains a BMI in the 21-22 range. Her total LDL is >160, HDL about 40 on a good day. Her genes suck, most recently evidenced by her uncle who took out the posterior wall of his heart and managed to survive this triple bypass surgery.

I have also heard the apocryphal story of the marathon runner who was the first man in his family to live past the age of 35. He died in his 40’s secondary to a massive heart attack. So a great diet is not going to save you from everything. Diet and exercising can help mitigate some processes and make it less likely that you might have a particular disease, but it’s not a panacea.

Blaming the victim also really doesn’t do a whole hell of a lot for me nor my patients. “You brought this on yourself so suck it up and deal, you worthless idiot” is basically how most of my patients hear your message. Yeah, that’s really going to motivate them to change what they do.

As for nutritional supplements not being patentable, look up what Lovaza is, then we can discuss further.

@clayton — if you actually read the posts and comments here, you would notice that no-one is claiming that diet and exercise have no effect. Fact is, doctors are always on about diet and exercise, also frequently noted here, and the non-doc commenters seem quite on-board with that awareness. The point, however, is that when you start blaming ALL illness and infirmity on diet and exercise, and discount all other causes which are not, in fact, under one’s control, that is quite clearly “blame the victim.” When you say that a kid (or a kid’s mother) must have done something wrong in terms of nutrition in order for that kid to have developed Type I diabetes, that is blaming the victim. See?

As forLarge randomized placebo controlled studies on nutritional supplements have one problem. Companies can’t patent them the way you can a drug.

BOLLOCKS.

No, seriously. Anything can be patented. Any “natural” compound can be patented when it is demonstrated that it has a novel application, and the definition of “novel application” has been stretched beyond all recognition. People’s genes have been patented, did you know that?

Now, I am not defending the patent law as practiced — far from it, I think it’s ludicrous. But whenever I hear the old “they won’t invest because you can’t patent it” bullshit I feel like screaming. It’s complete nonsense.

The reason you don’t get those compounds submitted through the FDA is that they would actually need to prove claims for efficacy and safety. If they get to dodge the cost of doing that and sell unregulated as “supplements”, everything they make is pure profit. And there is a lot of pure profit. Even — or especially — on things which have never had to be tested to see if they are work or whether or not they have serious side effects. From the company’s point of view, that’s pure win. Money for nothing.

Speaking of which, you might want to check up on just how many of those “mom and pop” type supplement companies are in fact very large pharmaceutical corporations or wholly-owned subsidiaries of large pharmaceutical companies. Perrigo springs to mind.

While it is absolutely true that lifestyle can affect risk factors for disease, it is also true that smoking is generally the biggest single one of these factors. Diet also does affect things like cholesterol levels (which are risk factors) and diabetes (actual disease), and most certainly health care providers highlight their importance. So these are things people control.

But it is also true that family history is very, very important. This is why doctors want to know family histories – because the associations are high and undeniable. And it applies to almost everything (I was listening to Dr Radio the other day, and there was a question about a guy who had an aneurysm as a result of blunt trauma; his mom wondered how closely it needed to be monitored, and the first question the doctor asked was, “Does your family have a history of aneurisyms?”)

When lackawhoons like Mike Adams talk about “prevent disease with a healthy diet” they aren’t talking about controlling cholesterol and Type 2 diabetes. They are talking about completely unrelated things, like cancer and kidney disease. My family has rampant kidney disease. Based on the incidence, we can tell it is genetic, because it is X linked, and was carried by my grandfather on my dad’s side. Thus, all of my aunts on that side of the family are carriers (and it is recessive, so it doesn’t present in them, but more on that below), but about half of their sons have it. None of my uncles’ kids have it, of course, nor do I or my brothers. It is interesting that, as far as I know, none of my aunts have ever presented any symptoms due to it, but I know that my infected cousin’s girls are. That’s kind of curious.

But the point is, none of this has to do with nutrition. That’s not the cause of the problem.

Large randomized placebo controlled studies on nutritional supplements have one problem. Companies can’t patent them the way you can a drug.

The stupid thing about this comment is that, while making that pronouncement, there are others who constantly bring up stuff like Vitamin D and Niacin supplements, because (they assert) there are great scientific studies that show these things to be wonderful!

IOW, studies of the effects of nutritional supplements aren’t carried out, except when they are.

It’s true that you can’t patent an existing compound — but you CAN patent a delivery mechanism, and you CAN patent certain combinations of existing compounds, and you CAN patent subtle variations on existing compounds.

And even when you can’t patent, you can establish trademarks and market the hell out of them, and that can be very useful in defending your market from competitors.

RE: Raw-Food diet –
I went on a ‘raw-food’ diet for about a week once while in college (DISCLAIMER: It was due to a lost bet). It was kind of nice, eating bunches of delicious home grown veggies. I didn’t expect it to do shit (which, incidentally, is what it did). I wanted to see a)If I could do it for a week, b)if I felt any different. Also, during the week I gave up smoking and drinking. I did feel an extra pop in my step after that week, but really needed a smoke, and a pint and bacon. Lots of bacon. Chalk that up to not staying up late and partying 🙂

Regardless, I think I could have gotten the same experience if I would have just ate a bran muffin in the morning and got some sleep.

Also, on that point, from what I can remember from my intro biology classes (hey, I went marine bio so I was only in human biology for a class), aren’t there both pro’s and con’s to cooking veggies, depending on the veggie? That is, when cooking certain veggies, the chemical breakdown creates goodies for us, while in others it breaks down goodies?

Well here we go again. It seems to me like for someone like Orac who hates natural news so much, he sure does keep up with the news on that site.

it is a great site to read and see how our government and big pharma is screwing us over.

——

Words to the wise from a real conservative:

If you wish to burn an American flag, do me a favor and wrap yourself in it before lighting it on fire.

My neighbor want to BAN ALL GUNS! I totally repect their opinion. As a matter of fact I repect their hatred for guns so much I have made a solemn oath not to use my guns to protect them if they should ever need protecting.

Apparently I have been misinformed or I misunderstand the claims regarding patent law. If I was wrong so be it, I have no problem admitting that. Now lovaza is an interesting point, I met one of the Norwegians who worked on the business development side of things. Now here is what I do know, or rather what I have been told. So I am open to the possibility that it may be innaccurate. So lovaza is http://www.accessdata.fda.gov/drugsatfda_docs/label/2009/021654s023lbl.pdf
LOVAZA is a prescription medicine for adults called a lipid-regulating medicine. LOVAZA is made of omega-3 fatty acids. Omega-3 fatty acids are natural substances that your body needs. 276 They are found naturally in some plants and in the oil of certain fish, such as salmon and 277 mackerel.

At the same timehttp://www.fda.gov/SiteIndex/ucm108351.htm
In 2000, FDA announced a similar qualified health claim for dietary supplements containing EPA and DHA omega-3 fatty acids and the reduced risk of CHD. FDA recommends that consumers not exceed more than a total of 3 grams per day of EPA and DHA omega-3 fatty acids, with no more than 2 grams per day from a dietary supplement.

So GSK can sell Lovaza for $150 a month, and the FDA allows the prior claim to be put on fish oil products in part due to the research done on Lovaza. And then you have the wall street journal saying this.
“There’s no evidence Lovaza works better or is purer than high-end omega-3 dietary supplements — such as those made by Nordic Naturals Inc., of Watsonville, Calif. — which cost less than half as much as Lovaza does per gram of EPA and DHA.

A 2004 analysis of 44 kinds of omega-3 supplements by ConsumerLab.com1, based in Scarsdale, N.Y., found that none had unsafe levels of mercury or PCBs. And Lovaza wasn’t used in most of the promising clinical trials with omega-3.”

So I hope that GSK is recouping the costs of their studies. But I know from personal experience that there are people who are purchasing supplemental omega-3’s from other sources than GSK.

Yes I know that the pharmaceutical companies are the producers of the raw ingredients of most if not all vitamin manufacturers. I also know that all the amino acids come from japan, excepting what Lonsa makes in regards to the l-carnitines.

Regarding human geneshttp://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-03-29/myriad-loses-ruling-over-breast-cancer-gene-patents-update1-.html
March 29 (Bloomberg) — Myriad Genetics Inc. lost a U.S. court ruling over its patents for a way to detect inherited breast cancer in a decision that may lead to other challenges to gene-related patents.
U.S. District Judge Robert Sweet in New York ruled the patents invalid today, saying they “are directed to a law of nature and were therefore improperly granted.” See that last line. That is what makes patenting “natural” supplements so annoying for pharmaceutical companies. From a purely business standpoint, that marketplace is extremely fickle and idiotic, I know I work with them. So you can patent the process, or the delivery mechanism but not a whole complete herb or food etc, unless you modify it..which is what a GMO, and we all know how much fun the hippy’s and the thumpers have harping on that issue. I

I never dismissed family history. I never said everybody who eats X is going to Y. quit putting words and thoughts into my mouth. My experience comes from working at a health food store years ago. And asking people if they would like to begin the easy way by cleaning up your diet, so many, not all but many people just rebuffed that idea straight away. And for the reasons I mentioned above. And yes, I would tell people to consult with their doctors before beginning anything.

Anyways, I am sick of my industry because of the woo. I want to go back to school and study microbiology particularly fatty acid metabolism. And get the hell away from people who think that a machine can make your water alkaline hence balance your pH. “Mmm this is some yummy magic water you got”.

@pablo, Thank you for missing the rest of my quote and taking it out of context, which actually shows I missed saying something, hmm.. My point was that in order to establish a FDA approved medical claim, one needs a patent, and a large scale double blind placebo controlled study. This is an obstacle, and thats all it is. I wasn’t complaining about it, just saying it will take a sizable amount of money to perform such research. GSK did it with Lovaza, and other fish oils have piggy backed off that research and all the other research not performed on their products. I believe there are some drugs on the marketplace that come from natural compounds and plants. But we all know that they are no longer “natural” due to the manufacturing process. Such as lovaza’s omega-3 ethyl ester fatty acids, it’s not quite a drug, but definitely not natural, unless you are eating Rakfisk with Aquavit in Trømso. jk

Orac is doing exactly what a doctor should do: presenting rebuttals to the misleading, inaccurate, and sometimes frankly dangerous information on that web site. Do you have a particular criticism of a point he made here? Can you identify a mistake? Are there scientific data that show Orac to be wrong? Please share them with us. I would be surprised if you were to change my mind, but it is possible.

Your completely irrelevant “real conservative” sputum indicates that you extrapolate your agreement with Adams on certain political points to agreement with him on health topics. A closer examination of Adams’ health information, such as the one provided above, shows that this strategy is foolish.

It seems to me like for someone like Orac who hates natural news so much, he sure does keep up with the news on that site.

Hate? What a strange perception. Seems to me more akin to keeping up with the latest stupid, albeit funny, sales ads or a very funny daily comic strip. The sad part is the numbers of the ignorant and the gullible who get sucked into Mike’s scam, opting for his useless majik advice and throwing their money away on his useless majik potions. Got to wonder how much this scenario eventually adds to a countries health bill.

You’d think someone who really believed in their products would spend their time pushing for research, evidence and accreditation rather than merely coming up with new ways daily to describe the Big Bad Boogey Man competition who cuts into his profits.

Still Mike’s little screeds are very funny…not that he is aware of it.

I like Natural News and Wellness Resources. I like Mike Adams from a health perspective, but have to disagree with him on the eco-freak things.

He is too involved in the marxist move to control the world in the name of environment. We have too many eco-terrorists in the EPA trying to regulate every aspect of our lives based on a satanic marxist lie (global warming).

I do not read the eco-crazy articles on natural news or anywhere else. I worship the God who created the world, not the world itself. Leftists claim to have reason and claim to be atheists, but they do worship the environment wether they recognize it as worship or not.

My God is Jesus Christ, creator and sustainer of the universe. Your God is a bunch of trees and dirt that will one day be destroyed(Read the book of Revelation).

I don’t know whether to be amused or insulted by your claim to know what or whom I worship. If you cared to actually talk to some “leftists” about what they believe, you will find that many are Christian. But as with so many other things, this doesn’t fit in with your preconceptions, so you simply dismiss the inconvenient facts.

I would propose that this is a major distinction between those who call themselves “True Conservatives” and the “leftists” whose application of reason you so blithely mock: one group actually applies evidence from the real world; the other just makes shit up.

Speaking of making shit up: I notice that you still have not shown any errors in Orac’s discussion. Are those forthcoming?

“…Your God is a bunch of trees and dirt that will one day be destroyed.”

So being concerned about deforestation, fish depopulation, waste disposal, energy consumption and so on, in short about ecology is being contrarian to Jesus teachings. I would never have guessed so.
But I have to agree, neither Jehovah nor Jesus ever said “Don’t you burn all forests”, so I suppose it’s OK to do it.
I was naively thinking that looking at minimizing the crap we leave behind is sort of, well, in line with His notion of don’t do unto others that you don’t want done upon yourself. Not to mention the warnings against hedonism and consumerism.
As my dear mom keep saying, “heureusement que le bon Dieu a le dos large, avec tout ce qu’on lui met.”
(approx. “It’s fortunate for Him that merciful God has large shoulders, with all the sins we make Him endorse”)

“The difference is that physicians are taught about nutrition and disease prevention based on science and evidence, not based on fairy dust, fantasy, and nonsense, which are the basis underlying Adams’s world view”

Growing up in a medical community (family members), I can tell you first hand that doctors know nothing about nutrition. However, I am seeing more and more doctors adopting methods using vitamins and nutrition to promote rapid recovery and health.

However, I am seeing more and more doctors adopting methods using vitamins and nutrition to promote rapid recovery and health.

Translation – More and more doctors who are deficient in critical thinking or see an opportunity to make some extra money peddling unnecessary supplements to their patients are promoting kooky ideas about nutrition.

Adams’ approach appeals to the, often powerful, desire for control over one’s life. The idea that you can avoid all disease by eating well and exercising is more appealing than accepting that unlucky encounters with microorganisms or faulty genes will cause disease.
Unfortunately, it just doesn’t pan out in the real world. Healthy eating and exercise may assist in preventing some diseases but certainly not all.

Thanks for the quote, my knowledge of the Bible is sorely lacking.
So Jehovah did tell us not to burn all forests, after all. I knew He was not a bad guy.
And our far side friends conveniently forget about this. (“I believe in Jesus”…”your God is a bunch of trees”)
Why I’m not surprised?

…Your God is a bunch of trees and dirt that will one day be destroyed.

Just to chime in, I’m an atheist.

The problem I have with faith: It’s the act of declaring yourself the supreme arbiter of the universe and that the gods bow to your whims.

My interest in maintaining the environment is largely aesthetic and economic in nature. Global warming will a lot of negative economic impacts and nice pieces of wilderness can be pretty to look at (and can bring in tourists).

People like Doctr Smart who use the Bible to shore up their opinions rarely seem to have actually read it.

I find this is true for most religious people. They only know what they have heard at Church and rarely ever crack open a Bible (at times I think they just make things up that sound good to them).

Fundamentalists don’t care what the Bible says, just what they believe it says. I am not an atheist but I find many who are religious lack the ability to think for themselves (I am sure this somehow makes sense anthropologically).

Doctr Smart seems to be running out of information to support his position, so he switches the argument to My God can beat up Your God.

Well, that is a very convincing explanation of the wisdom of Mike Adams rantings on the evils of medicine and the evils of health.

Doctors do advise patients to exercise, eat well, and to do all of the other things that quacks pretend is alternative medicine. I guess Doctr Smart’s God does not have any objection to His followers telling lies.

Where in Revelations is the part about all of the liars going to Heaven?

I suspect the reason he calls himself “Doctr” instead of “Doctor” is for the same legal reasons that the bright orange goop served with stale crackers in those little snack packs is referred to as “cheez”.

I was thinking about this post this morning listening to a radio PSA (for lack of a better term) by Georiga Cancer Specialists. They seem to be going for the alt med approach of finding patients. The announcer, who claimed to be an MD, said that 25% of women’s cancers and 28% of men’s cancers have been linked to diet and exercise.